Before Kurosawa.

Heinsuke Gosho

I'm a long time admirer of Japanese director Heinosuke Gosho,  His 1952 Entotsu no mieru basho / Four Chimneys / Where Chimneys Are Seen and 1954 Ôsaka no yado / An Inn in Osaka struck me as the pick of their Shomin geki or common people cycle, which was compared to the post WW2 Italian Realist films incorrectly. Nothing I've seen deals with the grinding poverty which dominates those. As he's not from the Blessed Trinity - Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu - which still dominate the discussion of Japanese film, I've never encountered a Gosho retrospective and have had to pick odd examples out of cultural events. However, Mubi now does a good selection of the later work and, raking through You Tube, I did discover a random lot of his earliest surviving material, with quite a number sub-titled. I'm up for that challenge, even when it means dealing with copies that are soft and washy.

All of Gosho's forty odd 1920s silent films appear to be lost (!) but his 1931 Madamu to nyôbô / The Neighbor’s Wife & Mine survives, considered to be the first all-sound Japanese film. We must take Shochiku Company's allocating Gosho to this project as a measure of his importance at that time. Their industry came late to talkies, allegedly under pressure from the benshis or screen-side narrators who had achieved celebrity influence in the twenties.  In Asia and Russia, silent films continued to be produced in the thirties, when European industries had gone over to sound.

Tanaka & Watanabe

 The Neighbor's Wife... is pretty basic for a film of 1931, when comparative sophistication was expected in Hollywood product. It opens with an extended pan across fields, which reveals a local working at his canvas for the Imperial Exhibition, on an easel set up there. Bowler hat wearing Atushi Watanabe, later a farmer in 7 Samurai, happens by and their discussion develops into a comic brawl with the artist's palette smearing Watanabe's face. To clean up, he heads to the local bathhouse but is berated by resident Satako Date for using the women's entrance. 

Despite these setbacks, Watanabe is so taken with the area that he buys a house there and moves his family in, wife teenage Kinuyo Tanaka no less, daughter Mitsuko Itsimura and the baby. At this point, the plot and the reason for the film assert. He is a playwright needing to complete a 500 Yen commission for his Tokyo theater and meet pressing bills. With as many sound effects as possible to demonstrate the Tuchihas Recording System, he is distracted from his work - a premise we will see in Hollywood productions like the Broderick Crawford sub plot in Del Daves' A Kiss in the Dark or the Tex Avery Sh-h-h-h-h-h.

Watanabe encounters a screeching cat, crying baby, the daughter waving a ringing alarm clock over him, a strawberry mark faced medicine salesman, Tanaka's sewing machine and finally the neighbors' jazz band rehearsal, where he goes to complain about the noise and is confronted by Date again.

This provides the film's most interesting element, the contrast between Watanabe's traditional household and the neighbors, who have their "Merry Jazz Band" banner in English next to a Ruth Chatterton Madam X poster and do the "Speed Generation" number, which our hero eventually joins. He goes back home where Tanaka has found his play-writing pad to be blank and he tells her that his work needs to incorporate speed. Unac-knowledged renditions of "Broadway Melody" and "My Blue Heaven" figure in the track.

No one could describe this as sophisticated. Scenes of the child peeing remind us that it is contemporary with Jean Renoir's On purge bébé. There is nothing here to suggest the complexity of Gosho's best work, though the film does finally become engaging as Watanabe and Tanaka fall in with the enthusiasm of their westernised neighbors.

 

Pick of the batch, 1933's Koi no hana saku Izu no odoriko/ The Dancing Girl of Izu is, not surprisingly, still silent complete with benshi captions and images of sound sources, as in the music performance. An immediately involving opening, has bicycle policeman Michitarô Mizushima telling the idlers that he is looking for a woman, who must have used the road to flee the local Yukawaro mine owner's house.  

Dancing Girl... Tanaka & Kobayashi

Outside the village, the family of itinerant players, headed by glasses wearing Tokuji Kobayashi, is faced by a sign reading “Beggars and traveling actors are not allowed to enter.” They are bailed up by the enraged locals till Student Den Obinata intervenes. The eyewitness account of a local kid confirms the family’s innocence and they are let go, the boy getting a slap from his dad who was one of the accusers. Obinata asks to join the troop on their walk to Shimodo Port.

Engineer Reikichi Kawamura spits - details add to the whole picture. He's come to approach mine owner Reikichi Arai, who rebuffs his demands for compensation when the worker had not supported them in their difficulties. Kawamura’s threats are seen as blackmail. The owner has to intervene when the retainer tries to see the disgruntled former employee off with a shotgun and he makes a token payment which Kawamura takes - “for train fares.”

On the road, we see Obinata buy a cloth cap to replace his student one, as he attempts to join the troop, but he is booked into a more suitable Inn than the one where the family stays.  

Their performance at the Inn turns into a shambles, with a drunken client snatching the samisen and the sword play dance, Kobayashi performs to distract him, interrupted in a struggle which puts the point through the screen separating the room from that of the engineer next door. Appearing sympathetic, he comes in and sorts out the rowdy before having a conversation with Kobayashi, whose family we learn sold the mine. He tells them they were cheated.

Kobayashi goes to new owner Arai asking for compensation (“I was deceived”) and is told the only way he will get support is if winning young sister Tanaka, in her best outing in this series, is sent to the mine owner’s home, taken to mean that she will have to become their geisha.

The student is understandably drawn to Tanaka and himself goes to see Arai, saying humbly that he feels the family is hard done by. The owner explains that he doesn’t believe Kobayashi is a bad person and that he will one day reform but the dissolute life the family leads is unsuitable. “There is not much difference between being a traveling actor and being a geisha.” The offer is to take Tanaka into his home as a ward, who will one day marry his own son. He has kept a bank book for her.

Obinata is now torn by his mutual attraction with Tanaka, who winningly throws stones off the bridge with him and runs up the bank to join him, when he walks ahead on the last stage of the journey. She sees the city as somewhere where he can take her to the movies but instead he goes to the ferry.

The film has the sustained and touching ending, where he asks for her comb as a souvenir and gives the brother his new cloth cab, resuming his student one. She asks to be allowed to write him and, in the suspense of the protracted scene, he finally discloses the mine owner’s plan, saying that it will provide security for herself and the family. They exchange gifts as he climbs onto the launch and she runs along the bank watching his ship pull out of sight. The question of his return the next year remains.

Her mother had brought the student a bag of persimmons for sea sickness, which she still
holds, unaware of developments.

This one echoes other prewar classic Japanese films - Souls on the Road or in the poem comparing the actors to floating weeds. European influence continually registers. The educated people wear Western clothes and smoke cigarettes while the locals still get about in kimonos. A motor bus passes the walking group. The student is admired for his short hair cut but a striking Japanese texture dominates - Shamsen & wood block dancers, the Go game,  charcoal brazier etc. Of the batch this still-silent entry is the film in which the director's mature personality is most evident.

In contrast, Gosho's under an hour long 1933 Hanayome no negoto / The Bride Talks in Her Sleep, again scripted by Akira Fushimi, is still an early Japanese talkie production. Basic staging in unremarkable studio constructions follows five male students, of whom only Tokuji Kobayashi  has graduated and married. The boys gather in a small bar. 

As they drink, his college mates are irritated that Kobayashi has moved on and now leaves them to return to new his bride (as it turns out Tanaka again). One gets a call from his dancer lady friend and goes off to join her, leaving the other three alone, so they resolve to drop in on the husband’s flat, finding him not back there and wife Tanaka uncertain. She locates the group photo and offers them hospitality - slices of sausage to eat with the wedding gift bottled liquor they volunteer to dispose of, as neither of the couple are great drinkers.

The Bride Talks... - Kobayashi & Tanaka

Kobayashi comes back to find the event advanced and reluctantly joins in. The friends are now pretty much out of it, so he and Tanaka go to their dorm room to sleep. Meanwhile bearded burglar Takeshi Sakamoto invades the house and ties up and strips the boys.

When the couple come back home they find them. The gang go off in borrowed kimonos. Tanaka’s talking in her sleep has been witnessd by the fourth member - pretty slight as plots go and no one gets a chance to make an impression.

The picture of contemporary urban Japan is muted. We only get out of doors for the views of entering or leaving the premises and a few model shots of the one car train distant at night. The slightness and constricted settings irritate at first but they generate the piece's style as it progresses. Gosho made a follow-up Hanamuko no negoto - The Bridegroom Talks in His Sleep in 1935.

 

Another Akira Fushimi script, Gosho's Jinsno ei onimotsu / Burden of Life was also filmed in 1935. Here control is developing, though the work still lacks assurance. 

It’s a family study, misleadingly opening with beret-wearing artist Kenji Ôyama painting wife, a topless (on the canvas) Kinuyo Tanaka again, when his brother in law, who shows interest in having a look at Kinuyo, drops by. The visitor’s wife has gone home to mother again. Preparations are in hand for a third sister’s wedding and attention shifts among them with domestic squabbles (“He gets upset when I come back with shopping bags”) and the women manipulating their husbands with “Reverse Psychology” like those irritating leading ladies of British TV series.

 Burden of Life : Yoshikawa & Saitô

However, the focus rather belatedly shifts to the sisters’ retirement-age parents Tatsuo Saitô and Mitsuko Yoshikawa  and young Masao Hayamason, the son they unexpectedly had at fifty. The boy plays with the neighbor’s children and eats at the kitchen table with the maid, trying to avoid his father, who is given to drinking and singing at meals.

After the briefly shown wedding (line of town cars on the road) his mother accuses dad of not caring for the boy, who he considers apprenticing rather than paying for schooling now that the expenses of his sisters’ marriages have made them sell off a couple of the family properties. No one seems really short of money in this film, with all the households retaining maids, though penniless artist Ôyama is interested in touching relatives for a loan.

Yoshikawa leaves, taking her son with her to a new home he doesn’t like as much as the old one and is further from his school. This brings up Saitô short. He goes clubbing in the pleasure quarter where a couple of his employees happen to be visiting and they make up an uneasy drinking circle. A hostess makes off with one of their felt hats, like the more rowdy girls in the Kurosawa Ikiru.

When the boy happens by the house next day,  Saitô calls him in and the maid is sent for his favourite bean paste sweets. He is feted by his father, signalling a new warmer relationship among the re-united family - and that’s the end of the film. Put it next to Poil de Carotte and this one is slight. The subject matter does anticipate Gosho's more substantial 1957Yellow Crow / Kiiroi Karasu.

Gosho’s technique is developing but still self-conscious, posing people to make studied edits or create less conventional groupings. A liquor bottle is placed in the foreground and there’s a three shot montage of the bar lights. A track in on the father is butted onto a track in on the boy. Scenes end with an image already seen, as punctuation. Music is sparse. The director seems largely uninterested in the settings, which are the most significant element to present-day viewers, with Western clothes and furniture again alongside traditional Japanese items. The film is quite agreeable but never fields the issues and situations that it continually seems to be about to investigate.  

In Gosho’s Shinsetsu / New Snow, the qualities of his major work are now coming into focus.  Made in 1942, it was the Daiei Company’s first major commercial success. This one runs more than two hours.  

Michitarô Mizushima, The Dancing Girl of Izu's bit player postman has become the school teacher lead, presented for our admiration. He stands apart from traditional Teachers College trained instructors in the classes he runs for his National School kids and argues with his fellow teacher, who has given a low mark to a student who draws a train as an abstract. Another scene has him being pulled across the playground by a line of his young class members, while lying on a wheeled platform. The exact educational benefit of this exercise is not explained.

New Snow

Mizushima also runs civics classes for the parents, where the feedback includes “When you are educating them, you are playing with them.” One military type criticises Mizushima for putting his hands in his pockets while lecturing. The message content of this film is near opaque. It really needs to be seen several times and backed with historical research. I don’t like it enough to do that, so we will have to rely on a first impression. 

It is clearly a WW2 propaganda production and there’s no pretense otherwise. Mizushima tells his pupils that they are learning to be good servants of the Emperor. When a member of his class’ bald headed dad abuses him, our hero calls him “Churchill” and, after we get a reference to the Yasukuni Shrine, Mizushima ends the film in military training joining the granfdather who still practices his archery skills in a traditional robe.  However Donald Richie tells us the authorities were unhappy that the director had turned the approved message making into a romance and it was only Gosho’s ill health which prevented reprisals. Despite severe TB, Gosho's career would continue to 1968.

New Snow's personal material also qualifies as inscrutable, though it’s rather more winning. The antagonist-father, now called Dhama, becomes a friend when Mizushima doesn’t tell his son about the indignant visit to the school. The leads are too reserved to pursue the romantic attractions they feel but discuss them with workmates, though at one stage we do get a visualisation in the form of photos falling out of a scroll letter. The people certainly emerge with much more sympathy than those in Mizoguchi’s overtly didactic 1941 Genroku chûshingura/ 47 Ronin, which is four hours about the glories of dying for your country. Well, Metro’s The Human Comedy pushes a similar message. Oddly Gosho is often compared to William Saroyan.

The climax has Mizushima called up for military service. There’s a nice farewell dinner where the characters edge towards letting their feelings be shown.  We then see him drilling in the way he had his classes perform and he writes back to say how much he values the experience. 

The cast often had long careers in Japanese film without coming to our attention.  Mizushima figures in the support of a few of the Baby Cart series. They mesh into a plausible ensemble. The film making is curious. Gosho is claimed as a specialist in editing. The cutting is notably choppy but you can see an effort to deal with problems through montage. An image of the child’s train drawing goes to a real train with the performers in the shot, which is followed by a closer view of their feet and then to them in the studio replica of a street, easing the transition between the two backgrounds. Trains are prominent, with the night time studio simulation of a cityscape coming with a model railway running through its background.

New Snow - art classes.

The setting is particularly interesting, again showing the country’s advance towards westernisation. This gives New Snow some interest straight off. Both men and women dress in kimonas but they work in military or hospital uniforms. Their houses are still divided by screens but these are solid timber and glass affairs and not paper. It doesn’t match any other Japanese films I’m aware of, possibly through the inaccessibility of War Time material.  The Occupation Authorities were said to have got in there burning negatives and the You Tube copy is from a worn projection print, though the transfer and sub-titles are good.

Watching progress in this random selection of Gosho's early work, we can observe his development both as a technician and a commentator. That's already intriguing and makes a great introduction to his major films. 

 

Barrie Pattison 2023

The Salomy Janes.

I tuned up Raoul Walsh’s 1932 The Wild Girl without knowing anything about it. Sometimes being a diligent film freak plowing through the margin entries on U-Tube comes good.  This has been the high point of my recent viewing. 

It's another of the William Fox Company films that have been allowed to vanish. I was at Walsh seasons in London, Paris and Edinburgh in the sixties, when he was being canonised. None of them came up with this one. That was the time I heard Sam Fuller, fronting his own retrospective, ask why the organisers were fooling about with him, when they could have invited Raoul Walsh.

Right from the get go, The Wild Girl has your attention. The titles are presented like a family photo album come to life, as each panel shows one of the performers in costume delivering a line to explain their character. (“I like trees better’n men. They’re straight”) It’s a pity this device didn’t catch on. It works better than the simulated page turnings the film uses to link scenes. Norbert Brodine, the cameraman who Elia Kazan thought had never done anything of note, catches the big trees environment imposingly, even with a few unobtrusive glass shot skies, at a guess, dropped in there to conceal distant roofs and telegraph wires. It doesn't do any harm either that New York’s MOMA has made this beautiful restoration. I notice that quite a few of the small number who saw the original screenings there, went on record to announce their delight.

Wild Girl - Joan Bennett

The film is an adaptation of Bret Harte’s short story “Salomy Jane’s Kiss” and the stage presentation derived from it by Paul Armstrong Jr. This had been filmed in 1914 and again with Jaqueline Logan in 1923, a lost version by George Melford from a scenario by De Mille writer Waldemar Young.  De Mille’s 1917 Romance of the Redwoods repeated the California Sequoias setting in a similar plot about a young woman saving her man from a vengeful mob, allegedly spun off an obscure German piece. The success of films of Owen Wister’s 1902 “The Virginian” would have endorsed interest in the lynching plot. 

Walsh’s film  opens endearingly with twenty two year old Joan Bennett’s blonde urchin child of nature frolicking in the big timber, sharing the frame with deer and bear cubs. She goes skinny dipping with the settlers’ children and hitches a ride in driver Eugene Palette’s Angel’s Gulch - Red Wood stage, only to encounter gropey town boss Morgan Wallace, who she evades by clambering onto the top of the speeding coach. The tricky stunt climb looks like it was doubled but Joan does do the ride along on the bouncing roof.

She’s the only eligible female about (like Lois Wilson in Victor Fleming’s great To the Last Man). Wallace’s purity league has had Mina Gombell’s saloon girls run out of town, though they were the basis of his success. Young Joan, is unsure how to handle her multiple suitors.  She disconcerts Irving Pichel (later to direct the superior Destination Moon and Martin Luther among less notable titles) by telling him that she’ll marry him if he kills off the offending Wallace for her. Silk hat gambler Ralph Bellamy (excellent) is also interested.

Wild Girl - Bellamy & Bennett.

Complications arise when Pallette’s stage is robbed and stranger Charles Seventh Heaven Farrell, still in his tattered Confederate uniform, rides into town looking for Wallace, who wronged his sister. Farrell gets bad notices for his performance here, doing a gentle soul twisted out of shape by his need for violence. Think Brian Ahern as a cowboy! He’s a lot more acceptable than he is in say the Borzage Liliom.  Charles is minimally distracted by the sight of Joan swimming bare-assed. He tracks down the villainous Wallace, after giving him a pistol to defend himself, and smashes through the timber door to put a couple of rounds into the fleeing blackguard. Gombell watches delighted.

 This is actually another transition western, again with minimal shooting, fighting and fast riding, and a strong on character plot. The only other shot fired in the film takes down a critter. Setting, story and performance carry the piece nicely.

  At this point the Bret Hart plot asserts with the locals forming a lynch mob to dispose of robber Willard Robertson (his best role) and killer Farrell. (“Those Vigilantes is allus clingin' and hangin' onter some mere scrap o'the law they're pretendin' to despise”) The film’s strongest scene is (of all people) Sarah Padden’s outburst, seeing the posse about to kill the father of her children. Stirred in, we get the Harte story, with Bennett’s Salomy Jane lifting onto his saddle and kissing Farrel, when he’s about to hang.

The Wild Girl - Farrell & Bennett.

Along with the sub plot of the local laying for her father James Durkin, we get Bellamy acting chivalrously to provide Bennett’s happiness with his new rival. He switches boots with the fugitive, confusing craven Pichel’s pack of blood hounds, with the nasty spotting the deception too late.

Wild Girl is a delight with its great piney woods visuals, excellent performances and well thought out plot but it's not flawless. No matter how appealing Walsh’s regular leading lady Bennett may be, with plucked eye brows and wardrobe department blonde ringlets she's never going to be the convincing frontier woman. We can recognise the director’s style - Pallette running up to deliver a line in close up, as part of the Walsh excessive knockabout. I never thought I’d be writing that we saw too much of Eugene Palette in a movie. A giggling Louise Beavers, replacing the Indian family of the original, is booted by Joan and slapped with a twig and I couldn’t spot Iron Eyes Cody - but I still find the film irresistible because (and appearances can be deceiving) it feels like the work of people who loved making movies for people who loved watching movies. This element will fade in the later Raoul Walsh films, though Gentleman Jim or The World in his Arms still retain traces.

However Wild Girl offers the director in full flight and is a project that stands among the best of its day. It really is a rare and genuine treat.

To get a better grip on the film I checked out Salomy Jane, the 1914 film, made contemporary with Birth of a Nation, as one of the first feature length productions and better adapted to the long form than most of the surviving examples.

Salomy Jane - Mabel Hilliard, Fred W. Snook, Peters, Nigh, Michelina, Ernest Joy and Jack Holt Behind Peters.

This early version already contains the add-ons to the Bret Harte plot found in later films -  rival admirers including the gentleman gambler in his silk hat, the feud (clearer here), Red Pete’s children, his daughter with the giveaway bracelet, the Sequoias. That looks like the same hollow giant redwood but this one has also found a truck size tree stump to use as a foreground object.

Middle aged Latina Beatriz Michelina, with her hand clasping gestures, is not much of a Salomy Jane but clean cut House Peters (senior) cuts a dash as “The Man” and the support are adequate. Long serving B movie director William Nigh plays one of the suitors and the film is a bit schizoid - a division between the imposing exteriors - the vigilantes gathering in the clearing or their horses kicking up water as they ride distant into the river in pursuit of the foreground lovers - alternating with the performers miming out the action in drab studio interiors. 

For an early feature, the pacing is quite sustained and there is Parallel Action, though the only close-ups are of inset objects - the sister’s picture, the feuding relative’s letter. I'd rate the handling by Nigh and co-director Lucius Henderson (Sapho 1913) as respectable for the day.

While this is an agreeable curiosity, we have a long way to go to get to the standard of Raoul Walsh’s so nice Wild Girl.

Barrie Pattison 2023.

Cairo & Beijing.

Hot on the tail of Ali Abbasi’s Iranian Ankabut-e moqaddas / Holy Spider comes another counterfeit, Tarik Saleh’s filmed-in-Turkey Walad min al-Janna/ The Cairo Conspiracy originally The Boy From Heaven, another film made abroad, about his original country by a disaffected national, to add to Mozjoukine in Hollywood's Surrender, Edward Dmytrick’s British Give Us This Day, the Taiwanese The Coldest Winter in Peking or the  French Swallows of Kabul.

Saleh had been around for a long time before his 2017 The Nile Hilton Incident drew attention. His impressive 2009 animated Metropia had some screening.

Cairo Conspiracy centers on young rural fisherman-family Tawfeek Barhom, with his pox marked face, accepted for the University at Cairo’s prestigious Azhar Mosque, the center of Sunni Islam rituals descended from the fifteen hundreds.  His Cairo taxi driver tells him he will become a sheik.

In Parallel with this, the State Security Organisation meets to be told by General Mohammad Bakri that the President requires his own man be elected the Mosque’s new Iman to resolve long running church and state disputes. Nasser, Saddat and Mubarek have already failed to bring the institution under their control. Bearded, scruffy Colonel Fares Fares has been given the task. 

Actor Fares also has form. Based in Sweden like Saleh, he appeared with Denzel Washinton in Safe House and became prominent in the series Deparment Q and its remarkable spin-off feature  Flaskepost fra P/Matter of Faith, directed by Hans Petter Moland no less. Fares had done one of the voices in Metropia.   

However the Colonel’s agent among the Azhar students has been exposed and, called on to find a replacement, he sets up Barhom. A night of cell phone conversation with Fares, between adjacent tables at the American Coffee house, offers the incentive of the gallstones operation which will save his father Samy Soliman’s life. Barhom returns to the Mosque to see his contact struck down by black robe men with knives. No one mentions the Muslim Brotherhood.

Fares’ investigation runs parallel with the students circle classes sitting in the Mosque court yard, learning the difference between Sharia and its enforcement, seeing biology demonstrated by a white mouse exposed to a coiled snake or listening to revered blind sheik Makram J. Khoury, who quotes from Karl Marx - impressive shots of the lines of red cap students passing along the background colonnades. 

 

 Fares forbids Barhom’s calls for advice to his village Iman and instructs him to join the Mosque's dawn prayer group. The boy identifies its members for him, from the wall display of passport photos. They accept him, while their leader is surpassed by Barhom’s dormitory associate in a Koran recitation contest broadcast on the mosque P.A. to the massed students. Fares requires the winner discredited and has Barhom plant police files under his mattress - impressive downwards shot of his one red cap moving through the standing crowd.

Still, the defeated student leader becomes suspicious and Barhom has to text S.O.S. to Fares, while he is being taken to the parapet of the Mosque tower. He is being threatened there when the Colonel shows up. “The drop is twelve meters - maybe thirteen” he tells the student leader, advising he should end his religious education and choose another profession “Tourism is opening up... The Sphinx is smiling again.” The parapet scene is the film’s highlight, as Fares psychs out the student without violence.

From this point The Cairo Conspiracy loses the considerable impetus it has built up. The blind sheik confesses to the agent’s murder, trusting the courts rather than the papers he knows to be in the government’s power.

Young Barhom becomes Fares’ agent in discrediting a rival Iman with an incriminating question at the massed rally. However the masterful Colonel himself is shown to be unequal to his younger, stronger commander and Barhom, who has demonstrated his scholarship by dismissing Fares’ burning boats analogy, and without knowing the personal danger he runs, resolves the situation in a jail cell debate with the blind Iman. I wonder if anyone thought of the comparison with Alec Guiness and Jack Hawkins in The Prisoner.

The film gets attention by mixing Sixteenth Century ritual and present day politics, mass religious spectacle and an Iman hoovering his mosque carpet and ordering Halal Big Macs. The only women characters are marginal domestic figures. Use of its simulated location impresses and performances are superior. Even if the ending lets down the imposing development, this is a notable departure from what we are used to seeing.

One commentator quoted the Arab proverb "Man will be free only when the last king has been strangled with the last priest’s entrails."

On the Net, you can find a copy of Xu’s Ang's 2014 Shi'er gongmin / 12 Citizens, a Mainland Chinese transcription of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men. It was only when this was drawn to my attention that I realised how widely the work has been filmed since Franklin Shaffner’s 1954 TV production, including the 1957 Sidney Lumet - Henry Fonda movie, Artur Ramosthe’s 1962 Argentinian  12 Homens en Competo, the Polish 1963 Kaksitoista Vacamiesta, a 1963 German Die zwölf Geschworenen, Artur Ramons’ 1973 Doze Homens em Conflito, Basu Chatterjee’s 1986  Hindi Ek ruka hua faisla / A Pending Decision , Nakahara Shun’s 1991 Japanese The Gentle Twelve 12, a 1991 William Friedkin-Jack Lemmon film, Dom Thuil’s 2010 French 12 Hommes en colère and probably a whole lot more. It’s surprising how extensively a piece of precisely located special pleading has taken off. The most impressive effort to me remains Nikita Mikalkhov’s 2007 12, the longest and most resonant production.

The Chinese film is set up by a framing story about law students exploring the American legal system, which doesn't exist in their country, by hearing an actual case with a dummy trial in front of a jury of family and law school staff. It’s distracting to watch what elements of the original they preserve and what ones they jettison.

 He Bing.

Here we actually get a glimpse of the killer leaving the murder scene as a train passes. There’s an attempt to detail a new environment by staging the deliberations in a store room where they keep the fire extinguishers. Instead of a heat wave we get a storm, which leaks through the roof about the time discussions are getting angry, and up dates like dissenting juror He Bing comparing the illegal knife he bought off the net with the murder weapon viewed on his lap top. Possibly the most telling alteration is that the wavering juror is no longer reproached for his instability as victim of his Madison Avenue thinking. 

The Chinese are more considerate than their U.S. originals. Otherwise it’s pretty much the familiar development - deliberations reveal the jurors’ prejudices with the requirement of a unanimous verdict driving the action. They do throw in references to the Hundred Flowers period and the Gang of Four. Gao Dongping’s gangster tattoo can be glimpsed through his sweat soaked shirt and instead of an accused from a U.S. minority we get a well-off adoptee turning on his birth father, a bit of class warfare. Again there are no women characters.

Lead He Bing was in Zhang Yang‘s Xi zao / Shower back in 1999. Technical work is efficient rather than accomplished. The restricted palette of the Chinese lab work fits the drabness the film utilises. The performances are all nicely judged and first time movie director Ang Xu is smart in choosing a subject which relies on the skill with actors he has been able to develop in a successful theater career. 

The copy is sharp, correctly framed and has good sub-titles.

Barrie Pattison 2023.

The 2023 Persian Film Festival (what happened to our Iranian Film Festivals?) has had a soft launch. I would guess that, like the Poles, whose event has a similar low profile, they have concluded that they waste their time promoting to the wide public in a city with no movie enthusiast structure, and concentrate on the original language community.

Co-directed by Ehsan Mirhosseini and Bardia Yadegari, who plays the lead, Mantagheye payani / District Terminal is an overseas prize winner which was also selected here.    

This one gives us an account of double duty director Yadegar playing shaven headed author Peyman, trying to edit his book in the apartment with his Ariel Dorfman, Jim Morrison and Ingmar Bergman pictures on the wall. His encouraging teenage step daughter, back from the 'States where it cost so much to send her, tells him that as Poet, stepfather and junkie, he is the perfect combination. Yagedar's wife, who he married in the hopes of getting himself a U.S. visa, skypes from there with a different character summary listing his faults, including failure to learn English and prepare himself for employment in the U.S., with the application she claimed she lodged for him proving a lie. 

His mother Farideh Azadi is no more approving, questioning his fate when she will not be there to protect his interests, and his circle of friends are also dismissive. The neighbor, smoking with his wife on the roof of the ground floor building in the court of their intimidating seven floors, concrete slab apartment block, is more concerned about the fate of the country’s forests being destroyed by the run-off from the tons of garbage dumped there, taking visitor groups and giving A.V. presentations, which Yadegari walks out off. One Gone With the Wind recalling shot draws back from the Eco-warrior stretched out on a mountain of rubbish a mile wide. 

A more successful acquaintance is contemptuous of Yadegari’s starving artist lifestyle (“I have money which means I have everything”) while another friend has picked up an easy spot being an official censor (Ayatollah photos on his wall), telling our hero that, without official consent, he will waste his time self publishing the book hand corrected pages of which are spread across the apartment floor and his Addicts Anonymous group, which congratulates members when they go twenty four hours without using, doesn’t seem to be much help. Did I mention that the people living in the next block fled their building under cover of night?

To complete his Job-like existence, though he brushes compulsively, Yagedari’s teeth are falling out  Our hero has to be revived when he collapses in the shower prefiguring a heart attack. The sky fills with a fireball.                                            

The unrelenting grimness is distanced by the film form - the closest to a completely impressionist movie I’ve encountered, with the story related in unconnected scenes, sometimes a single brief shot, each containing further information. The blonde girl lover sings in English. Downwards camera angles repeatedly place the lead in his desolate urban setting. We get stock footage clips of faceless workers advancing in yellow hazmat suits .

If you want a comparison, this is better judged and more involving than the similarly doom laden Beau Is Afraid now in wide release and likely to circulate far longer.

This grim picture of the Iranian scene is made by one of their own production companies in collaboration with the Germans. 

 

A similar stretch as a prize winner in a Persian Film Festival, Ankabut-e moqaddas / Holy Spider is a Danish Oscar contender made in Jordan. These transplant movies are not new. Russian Fedor Otzep made an impressive Brothers Karamazov in Germany, German Fritz Lang shot Manhunt in Hollywood or think American Edward Dmytrick’s Give Us this Day with its Brooklyn reconstructed in a British studio. They do however seem to be a phenomenon of today’s Islamic states - The Swallows of Kabul. Though born in Tehran, director Ali Abbasi, who has drawn some attention for his previous Shelley and Border, is offering content that would not have been possible on his home turf.

Holy Spider - Zar Amir-Ebrahimi & Arash Ashtiani center.

 Holy Spider is frequently called a film noir or compared to Se7en but, rather than Zodiak, its subject resembles the Subway Vigilante, who the U.S. police were said to be reluctant about arresting while he was doing their job for them. In this film we get a serial killer who operated in Iran's Holy City Masshad, dominated by the AImam Reza Sunit Shrine glimpsed briefly. The victims were female prostitutes throttled with their head scarves, giving an added resonance. Among the most marginalised members of society, they were reviled for their association with vice - sex work and drugs, here opium. The film’s thriller elements, crime, menace in dark, mean streets, play against his society's ambivalence about the killer

 Arriving from the capital, where she acquired a scandalous reputation by resisting the advances of a superior, comes chador-wearing journalist Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, who immediately runs into a hotel clerk unwilling to honor her reservation because she is a woman alone. Our heroine rapidly puts him in his place. 

Her local newspaper contact Arash Ashtiani even has recordings of the calls the killer makes him after his crimes. The colleague is sympathetic but he already knows the demands of the officials, police and clerics who have to be mobilised. Early on we see in grisly detail genial husband and father Mehdi Bajestani collecting street women on his motor bike and taking them back to his family home to murder them, while his wife and children are away. Once the wife's unexpected return means he has to carry on with a victim's foot still visible in the carpet he has her wrapped with.

Events are obviously going to funnel down to Amir-Ebrahimi mounting the killer's motor bike with a clasp knife in her bag, a potential victim. The unpredictable element is how the official structure will deal with the crime of a respected and well connected citizen, something intended to expose the decay of their society. The TV monologue by the killer's teen aged son is chilling.

The film's characteristic limited colour palette, strong on greens and browns, and skin defects emphasised by an absence of make up, all go with the grim subject matter. Leads Amir-Ebrahimi & Bajestani are imposing in a strong cast. This one makes its point and holds attention.

Ali Behrad's Tasavor / Imagine, the director’s first film, turns out to be a curious example of movie making gone astray. A misguided Iranian attempt at complex structure has leading star, the maturely glamorous Leila Hatami (A Separation) and Mehrdad Sedigan as passenger and cab driver,  the film's only significant characters, with the leads apparently doubling as support in the other's flash back episodes. 

We first see him driving her to a hill where she disperses her brother’s ashes (“In the end, we gave him to the wind”) with the flamboyant gesture undermined. “I’ve got my brother in my eye.” She later turns up in a blue wig, hiring the cab and making up there as a singer entertainer, and again on foot in her bridal veil, after being dumped on the wedding day and threatening to use the alimony she’s due to make the groom turn up for the reception. There’s discussion of a dating App. (“If I’m in this situation, it’s due to shy guys like you”) and she argues “It was better to be a second wife than nothing,” though only getting a 400 ft square apartment in the deal.

This is spaced with glimpses into their outside lives, like the bakery where where he talks about fancying the counter girl. She describes the ashes scene, apparently not recognising him and the film ends with Sedigan alone, undoing the knotted hair she has admired - and weeping. This gets to be confusing and takes all the considerable charm of the beautiful people leads to keep attention.

Minimal glimpses of the Iranian scene. Nice camerawork from Alireza Barazandeh catches touches like the heart shaped red helium balloon escaping the confines of the car and lifting away.

The three films which I saw, of which two were expatriot entries, don't add much to knowledge of the Iranian film scene or the country they depict. The film makers, who once attracted world attention there, were not represented.  Several have been silenced but still we have glimpses of dissatisfaction with the restraints of the currently challenged, religion based leadership. 

Barrie Pattison 2023

German Film Festival 2023.

Margarethe von Trotta’s ponderous new art movie Ingeborg Bachmann - Reise in dieWüste / Ingeborg Bachmann - Journey into the Desert follows the name writer’s association with playright Max Frisch and the other celebrities they jam in. It’s a big picture with shooting in Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Italy & Jordan. Unfortunately all this ambition is rewarded with tedium.

From the ringing phone which reveals laughter before current thinking man’s love object Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread, Corsage) wakes institutionalised, this one zig zags between  her success as a celebrity poet and her debilitating affair with dramatist Max Frisch (an imposing Ronald Zehrfeld) which leads to her delivering orations like the celebrated “The Truth is Bearable for Humankind.” The pair find it impossible to live together in his native Zurich or her Rome comfort zone - scene of him being got up uneasily in a Roman tailor’s white suit to the admiration of a passing shop girl. The crunch point comes when Krieps burns the diary, which he has used to incorporate their relationship into his plays - something he takes for granted and she sees as betrayal. Throw in the odd actual-turned-surreal touch like her radio drama’s audience of blind men in black ties or the nightmare of the cigar setting her green dress on fire.

He goes off accompanied by blonde tootsie Luna Wedler, while Krieps heads into the desert with replacement squeeze Tobias Resch - scenes of camel riding and being buried in the burning sand. There’s a nice tango scene. Fraulein Krieps’ admirers are belatedly rewarded by her in  four way group sex.

Along the way, they drop more names than a drunken marquee letterer - include poet Guiseppe Ungaretti (an even more aged Renato Carpentieri from Tenderezza), Hans Werner Henze represented by Basil Eidenbenz, Kleist, Laurence of Arabia and Luchino Visconti, who seems to be the template from which they are working.

Despite all this determined aspiration to high art, the piece come across closer to the old Hollywood two for the price of one artists bios - Chopin and Georges Sand in Song to Remember, Van Gogh and Gauguin in Lust for Life or, rather better, George Sanders’ Gauguin and Herbert Marshall’s Somerset Maugham in the Albert Lewin 1942 The Moon and Sixpence.

Ingeborg Bachmann might resonate with people familiar with its subjects’ work -  or it might not. It has the novelty of a mid Twentieth Century setting and the subdued colour craft aspects are superior but, coming with the memory of Margarethe von Trotta’s sharper (and shorter) political thrillers of the seventies, it is a let down. Watching all that intervening work, that  has yet to reach us, would offer some clues.

 

Standing out from the program’s welter of unfamiliar names, comes Michael Bully Herbig. His
Winetou burlesque Der Schuh des Manitu was the all time biggest earning German film. His new Tausend Zeilen/ A Thousand Lines is a change of pace from that one or his Balloon. It’s a brisk not quite clever enough German A feature which explores what we think of as the Trump Era notion of Fake News, through actually a version of the story of real life exposed Der Speigel journalist Claas Relotius. That one now takes on resonance after the Tucker Carlson sacking.

Thousand Lines - Nay & M'Barek

However one of the advantages or hazards, depending which way you look at it, of my watching movies longer than most people have been breathing, is that some fall into line with material I’ve already enjoyed. The Gold Standard here remains Michael Curtiz’ 1935 Front Page Woman, where George Brent’s manipulation puts rival papers on the streets with news boys shouting different verdicts before the trial  judge comes back from diner to announce the Jury’s decision. Closer to the new movie’s subject we get European films like Jean Yanne’s 1972 Tout le monde il est beau, tout le monde il est gentil, where Yanne’s scoop, where he went into the wilds of the Amazon to get the facts from hostile tribals, is up staged by the report his rival sent back from his air conditioned hotel or Frederic Aubertin’s 2009 Envoyés très spéciaux/ Special Correspondents - the Gerards, Jugnot & Lanvin as reporters faking their kidnapping.

Here rumpled Spanish Journalist Elyas M'Barek is overshadowed by clean cut young star Chronik News Magazine reporter Jonas Nay, who has a string of coups like a Gitmo visit, playing soccer with the boy whose graffiti started a Palestinian conflict or talking to the family of black football champion Colin Kaepernick, all despite the demands of caring for his ailing sister. M’Bareck is unhappy at having to share his assignments on militias policing the Mexican border with Nay, who gets to do the fundamentalists, while he handles the refugee column with its woman pushing a baby in a pram through the desert. M’Barek is surprised with the speed with which his opposite number completes his portion.

Meanwhile M’bareck’s ideal family life with neglected wife Marie Burchard and the kids deteriorates.

At Home Office, the executives are planning to crate their furniture and move into bigger offices, after promotions largely brought by Nay’s successes. The young man is dismissive of a traditional journalist at the staff meeting and berates M’Bareck for not getting into the human material behind the headlines, dragging down the standard Nay had set for their joint article.

There’s a nice comic scene with the fact checker, who goes through the material at speed and confirms that Arizona is on the U.S. border and the other verifiable information, leaving the specifics to the correspondent on the spot. 

Alarmed that his name is on a suspect piece of journalism, M’Bareck voices his suspicions after finding a photo of a Militia member Nay claimed he had interviewed under another name in a file article. He is told jealousy is endangering his continued employment.  Nay, accepting German Press awards with a modest speech applauding serious reporting, is cut to M’Bareck flying himself and his photographer on his own dollar to the militia man’s isolated desert shack in Arizona with the snarling dog and slipping him the two hundred dollars he demands, against company policy of not paying for interviews.

Back in Berlin with his recording, M’bareck is dismissed by the golf player executives as a bad loser who pays for stories and he finds himself out of a job. It’s only when fellow foreigner, sub-editor Sara Fazilat pulls the original of an email, which Nay corrupted, that her superiors realise they are in the middle of a major press scandal. She ends up crating her funiture for the big office.

Performances are everything that’s needed. The office infighting is broken up by striking location work - plausibly Monument Valey and the Palestinian Territories. We get the opening filmed backward and a black and white scene. The effects - characters walking through the graphics, placing the text of articles behind the actors or popping off the discredited items in the repeated scenes illustrating Nay’s scoops - is good and the TV commercial putting forward the new journalism claims of the bogus Chronik magazine is spot on.

Herbig’s works all have different textures but the same ironic cynicism underlies each one.

 

Elyas M'Barek is back in Liebesdings / Love Things from director Anika Decker who wrote the Rabbit Without Ears Movies, a polished and topical romcom, which mixes a critique of show business glamor and a bit of current ideology.

M’Barek is a movie star on his way to his premiere past a row of posters with his face already graffitied. To avoid frantic fans, he dives into the small neighborhood Theater 3000, which turns out to be a failing Feminist venue, where the entertainment includes transexuals’ monologues and dancing tampons. One of the acts outlines her intimidating sex quiz, for prospective partners before she puts out. Swigging on their shlooms beverage wipes M’bareck out and passers-by get ‘phone cam shots of him throwing up on a lamp post. Theater Manager, the appealing Lucie Heinze takes pity and he goes undercover (disguised as a clitoris) in her world of fluid sexuality, while she is taken aback with a his luxury apartment featuring a giant yellow push top pen. (“It’s art!”)

This produces the consequences we expect from the Beautiful People. Their night together is gangbusters but the morning after doesn’t go so well. Living from hand to mouth, she tells him he should connect with reality and he comes back that he’s been a star since he was eighteen and champagne galas, TV interviews and adoring fans are his reality.

However his entourage can’t deflect the damage when mean journalist Alexandra Maria Lara, now no longer the ingenue we remember from Downfall and The Tunnel and here doing an authoritative turn as a mean show business journalist, manages to unearth a youthful scandal. When this gets wide publication M’Barek’s show business prospects vanish, with the exception of a fruit beverage commercial, where he can’t master delivering lines while being whisked skyward harnessed to a rope. In the nicest twist, now that his past has become public, M’Barek resolves to seek out the member of his teen gang that the cops had taken, only to find him become successful accountant Anton Weil, who is himself feeling guilty about not looking for his old associates. Weil’s young daughters are awe struck to find that he knows the star.

It all works out with what passes for charm in a current European feature movie and fills in the time well enough. Production is smooth.

I only watched a small section of the German Film Festival material but, in days when we are
spoiled for choice, I didn’t find myself motivated to explore more.

Barrie Pattison - 2023.

 This one was put behind a wall and then re-instated by Google.

Excessive.

Tropa de Elite/ Elite Squad  & Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro/  Elite
Squad 2: The Enemy Within

So I skimmed through the SBS program for the week and they had something Brazilian called Elite Squad as the late, late film. Well, being a curious insomniac movie completist I am the target audience for such presentations. I tuned in and it wasn’t long before my jaw was hanging open.

In contrasty colour José Padilha (previously director of the festival hit documentary Bus 174) offers grim faced star Wagner Moura narrating as commander of the elite Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE, the Special Police Operations Battalion of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police). He wants to spend time with his wife and new baby and is  searching for his replacement as the Pope’s nearing visit dictates a clean up of the hill top favellas made no go areas by murderous drug gangs.

Moura - Tropa de Elite

 We’ve seen this juxtaposition of the prosperous ground level privileged and the desperate slums in South American film before, as early as Bruno Barreto’s 1978 Amor Bandido or in City of God. Here the film  flash backs contrast police recruits hard head Caio Junqueira and glasses wearing law student André Ramiro. The fact that Ramiro is black is never an issue. They find law enforcement seething with corruption bankrolled by kick backs from the drug dealers.

Ramiro’s law degree studies compromise him when his fellow students are smoking the dealers’ pot and the privileged class white girl from the charity NGO he makes it with turns out to be a dope runner’s mistress.

The breaking point comes for Junqueira when a distraught mother can’t bury her dead drug look-out son because the body can’t be located, while the cops shift cadavers out of their jurisdictions to stop the murders appearing on their unit statistics.

The two room mate cops have been put to work in the police garage, which is near inoperable because corrupt officers sell the motors out of new cars and replace them with old clapped-out ones. Junqueira hits on the plan to buy the spare parts they need by putting the commander’s car out of action, so that his usual pay off collection is delayed and the duo send in their own vehicle to get the cash. What’s the commander going to do - call the police?

This ends up with the pair transferred to canteen duties and their master mechanic peeling potatoes. Part time brothel owner police lieutenant Wilhelm Cortaz is sure the cops, who want him to go with them on the next pay off pick up, plan on doing him in over taking the bribe money, so the pair set off to cover him with sniper fire from the opposite hill, only to find themselves out gunned.

At this point - flash back to the opening - the  Elite Squad arrive and save them with their own merciless attack. The boys are hooked and sign up for the BOPE selection process which makes marine training in Officer and A Gentleman or Vietnam boot camp in Tigerland seem genteel. The brutal recruitment procedure  usually eliminates all but eight of the hundred applicants. This time it goes down to three. The instructors deliberately target corrupt trainees, crushing Cortaz. Their preparation includes abseiling the cliff face and live fire exercises in the real favella alley ways, where Junqueira proves too gung ho.

They move on the slums and the retaliation takes out Junqueira when he delivers the glasses Ramiro had promised a local kid. Finding  the BOPE skull  tattoo on Junqueira’s body, the gang bangers realize they are doomed - securing the danger area  for the Pope now forgotten.

The dope gangs are equally appalled to find the NGO had a cop among them. They shoot and burning tire necklace a NGO couple, causing a protest march. The girl friend tries to help, getting their promise that they won’t injure the fugitive killer’s girl - cut and the squad have a blood filled plastic bag over the girl's face to get his whereabouts. The unit raids the favella and takes down the dealer, who lies on the ground pleading not to be shot in the face so that his body can be shown in an open casket.

Twisted time structure, high contrast greenish colour, maximum violence and cynicism. This is rivetting.

I’m still digesting it when next week SBS slap on the sequel in the same small hours time slot. We pick up seven (?) years later with hero Moura again narrating as the BOPE methods (“a police force with a skull for it’s symbol”) are the subject of a condemnatory lecture theater session by liberal reformer Irandhir Santos.

The situation is even worse now that armed raids have all but cleared the slum areas of the drug gangs, leaving the corrupt police militia to take over the rackets. There’s now an  alliance of the populist media, the governor going for re-election and the bent coppers. Maura’s ex-wife Maria Ribeiro has married Santos and they are raising Moura’s son.

Shift to Bangui prison, controlled by the murderous street gangs who continue their feuds inside. One lot revolts, finds an opposing leader and sets on fire the cell full of bedding where they have him. The prisoners demand Santos as negotiator and he goes in without a Kevlar vest and manages to stabilize the situation but the Skulls have been called (“BOPA doesn’t give a shit”) with Ramiro in charge and the CCTV shows them waiting guns leveled behind the door the prisoners tried to smash to get more weapons - very Fritz Lang. When the door is opened there is  a massacre leaving the armed prisoners dead and Santos with blood spatter all over his "Human Rights" shirt.

Outraged Santos is on about social cleansing but the public love the TV coverage of the jail shoot-out, stoked by the fat rabble rousing news commentator who does dance steps on his show, so the governor promotes Moura (“I fell upwards”) to sub-commander of intelligence, where he is given control of ‘phone intercepts.

Meanwhile he is growing away from his son, who accepts the outlook of Santos, Moura’s biggest critic. However Moura is called in to retrieve the boy and his girl friend from jail for a marijuana offense for which the kid takes the blame to spare the girl. Father and son get to bond in a judo work out.

The police station in the uncontrolled area of Tanque is held up and their weapons taken. The Tanque station commander has spotted the fact that the raiders’ knowledge of procedure - and their boots - indicated rogue police rather than drug gangs. In retaliation Ramiro and his men secretly replace the bought police at a station in an area where the heavies expect no resistance and gun them down. The captured gang leader reveals the truth to Ramiro, who vows vengeance, so he is shot in the back by the crooked cop, in front of Commander Cortaz, who considered him the friend who had saved his life - surprise twist disposes of the central character of the first film. Think of him as a Brazilian Han Solo.

The poor’s most valuable asset is not the protection money they pay out for police monopoly cable TV and bottle water but their vote in the coming election. The girl journalist on the case tracks down the house where they heavies have stored the stolen weapons and election material together. She is ‘phoning Santos when the bad hats come back and rape and murder her - grim scene of an impatient heavy pulling the teeth out of her charred skull.

Moura gets the copy of her last ‘phone call off the illegal intercept he has placed on Santos’ phone and takes the recording away before his superiors come for it.

He realizes that they will try to off Santos, who is with Moura’s ex wife and his son, and he waits for them taking out the hit man’s car with his pistol, though the boy is shot in the exchange of fire. The scene of reduced-to-a-Suit Moura picking up the machine gun brought by the skulls and blasting rounds into the nasties is cheer worthy.

The resulting publicity returns Santos to parliament and he gives the rostrum in the House of
Representatives to Moura, who declares two third of the members he is speaking to be corrupt.

Same gritty hi-con look with even better production values. Imposing visuals - the chopper over-flying the kids playground or the final aerials of Brazilia as still corrupt survivor whore monger Cortaz flies in.

I’ve gone into surprise killing detail on these because they are unlikely to get any real distribution. I can’t find them on SBS on Demand but, for the determined, they are on You Tube in good English sub-titled copies.

We can see that José Padilha’s admiration goes out to the skulls, glimpsed drilling impeccably in their black uniforms and advancing under fire, leaving the regular police to cower behind them. Pot smoking do gooders are going to be burned alive by the impoverished mob they believe they are helping. Ramirez  notes contemptuously when the population turns out in the street over their deaths. “There are no demonstrations when policemen are killed.” The free press is a clown TV newsman and and an editor who refuses to follow up when one of his own is killed. Padilha’s solution is a not all that plausible parliamentary alliance between the shoot ‘em up lot and the reformers.

I was feeling superior about discovering these outstanding, gritty, obscure action pieces. Not indicated as a repeat, this must be presumed to be the local premier. Then I found they were the most successful Brazilian films of all time, the monster hit in the Spanish language market and Berlin Grand Prix winner. Here they  just sink into the void as most of the outside the festival net material does. It’s disturbing but not surprising that the pair reached us without  promotion, turning up as small hours movies on SBS the week that Australia's multi cultural broadcaster was busy trailering it’s series on Walt Disney. The Sydney Morning Herald TV Guide for the day featured Will Ferrel in Elf.  This was the week Star Wars 7 opened in the multiplexes and The Bélier Family was in the art cinemas. What kind of film is going to be made in an environment where this is the frame of reference? Answer - the kind that gets made in Australia.

In the real world the Elite Squad films were reviewed widely, usually by people who called them fascist & cited The Godfather.  The movie characters themselves dismiss the comparison with Mafia, the hoods saying the Italians eat lasagna while their lot chow down on rice and beans. This one is very ethno specific, complete with samba street carnivals.

Place the films instead in  a sequence where the answer to disorder is to send in the troops. Think President Walter Huston having the army stand gangsters against the wall in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and shoot them in  the 1933 MGM Gabriel Over the White House. Phil Karlson’s 1955 Phenix City Story ends in martial law but it introduces the caution against vigilante-ism. Elio Petri’s 1970 Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto / Investigation of  Citizen Above Suspicion  is a caution against the excesses of state control and the military, as is Daniele Vicari’s splendid 2012  Diaz - Don’t Clean Up This Blood (title in English).

I have no way of knowing how accurate the two Padhilha films are. Brazilians I asked endorse them but, whether it is sensationalized fiction or documentary actuality, the sure crafted, savage indignation of the production gives them plausibility. Tropa de Elite 1 & 2 make the movie product we are offered here insipid by comparison. 

 

Barrie Pattison 2023.